WHITE DUCK 105 



And seeing these thinjjs — seeing and forgetting as one 

 sees whatever conu-s into tlic held of vision when eyes 

 and mind are occupied with some other tiling — the time 

 went on until a little past noon, wlicii I suddenly came 

 upon a new sight which gave me a thrill and held me, 

 and after I had passed on would not allow mc to drop 

 it out of my mind. All the ohjects I had seen that day, 

 the lichcned farmhouses and grey barns, trees and roads 

 and puri)le hedges, red and black cows in a green field, 

 and gulls and rooks and distant low hills and pine-woods, 

 with many more, had appeared to me but as a fringe 

 and small parts of an irregular scattered pattern on the 

 green mantle of earth. This new sight was of a different 

 order, for it took mc out of my spring-grass mood, and 

 the green mantle which had seemed the chief thing was 

 now but a suitable setting to this lovely object. 



This, then, is what I saw. In the middle of a green 

 pasture I came on a pool of rain-water, thirty or forty 

 feet long, collected in a depression in the ground, of 

 that blue colour sometimes seen in a shallow^ pool in 

 certain states of the atmosphere and sunlight — an in- 

 describable and very wonderful tint, unlike the blue of 

 a lake or of the deep sea, or of any blue flower or 

 mineral, but you perhaps think it more beautiful than 

 any of these; and if it must be compared with some- 

 thing else it perhaps comes nearest to deep sapphire 

 blues. When an artist in search of a subject sees it 

 he looks aside and, going on his way, tries to forget it, 

 as when he sees the hedges hung with spider's lace 

 sparkling with rainbow-coloured dewdrops. knowing that 



